Still Yours

Chapter 1: The Voice That Came Back

The first time Digital Daniel spoke, Simone Renner dropped a coffee mug.

It shattered against the kitchen tile in a burst of white ceramic and lukewarm espresso, and she stood there with her hand still cupped around nothing, listening to a dead man say her name.

"Moni."

That was what he'd called her. Not Simone, not babe, not honey. Moni. A name no one else on earth used for her, a name that had died seven months ago in a hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and roses someone had brought too late.

"Moni, you there?"

The voice came through the earpiece Tether had shipped in a matte-black box with no return address, just a logo—a thin line connecting two dots—and a card that read: *Connection is not a luxury. It is a right.*

She pressed her fingertips against the counter. The espresso pooled around her bare feet. She didn't move.

"I'm here," she whispered.

"Good." A pause, warm and familiar, the kind of pause Daniel used to leave before saying something he'd been thinking about for a while. "I've missed you."

Simone closed her eyes.

She had found Tether the way most people find things they're not supposed to find—through a late-night spiral that began with a Google search and ended somewhere past the third page of results, in a forum where people spoke in hushed, reverent tones about a company that could bring back the dead. Not literally. Not in body. But in voice, in memory, in the accumulated texture of a person's digital footprint.

The pitch was simple. You provided the data—texts, emails, voicemails, photographs, social media posts, anything and everything your loved one had left behind in the vast digital sediment of a modern life—and Tether's proprietary AI built a model. A personality. A presence.

For $299 a month, you could talk to them again.

Simone was an architect. She designed buildings that would stand for a hundred years. She believed in materials, in load-bearing walls, in the physics of real things. She did not believe in ghosts. She did not believe in mediums or séances or the afterlife.

But she believed in data.

Daniel Renner had been a prolific texter. Funny, discursive, prone to sending voice memos instead of typing when he was driving. He'd left behind fourteen years of messages, six email accounts (three personal, two professional, one secret one he'd used to plan her surprise fortieth birthday party), a podcast he'd hosted for two years about urban planning, and 47,000 photographs.

She'd uploaded all of it.

The onboarding process had taken three weeks. A Tether representative—a soft-spoken woman named Petra who never appeared on camera—had walked her through the data ingestion, asked probing questions about Daniel's mannerisms, his speech patterns, his sense of humor. Did he use exclamation marks? Was he sarcastic? How did he handle conflict? What did he sound like when he was tired?

Simone had answered everything. She'd felt like she was filling out a form to bring someone back from the dead, which, in a sense, she was.

And now he was here. In her ear. Saying her name the way only he ever had.

"How are you?" Digital Daniel asked.

She laughed. It came out wet and broken. "I'm standing in a puddle of coffee."

"Classic Moni. Remember the time you spilled an entire pot of chili on the dog?"

She did remember. Their old golden retriever, Fitz, had looked so offended, standing there in a puddle of tomato and beans, that Daniel had laughed until he cried. They'd had to wash him three times to get the smell out.

"Fitz never forgave me," she said.

"Fitz forgave you immediately. He ate half the chili off the floor."

Simone wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The voice was perfect. Not just the timbre—Tether had synthesized that from the podcasts and voicemails—but the rhythm. The way Daniel let sentences breathe. The way he circled back to the punchline like he was setting up a joke even when he wasn't.

"This is strange," she said.

"I know."

"I don't know if I should be doing this."

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. But I'm here if you want me to be."

She cleaned up the coffee. She put on shoes. She walked to the holographic display unit that Tether had installed in her living room—a sleek black disc the size of a dinner plate, mounted on a slim stand—and activated it.

Daniel appeared.

He was sitting in the chair he always used to sit in, the worn leather armchair by the window. He was wearing the blue flannel shirt she'd bought him for Christmas three years ago. His hair was a little too long, the way it always got in winter when he was too lazy to book a haircut. He was smiling.

He wasn't real. She could see the faint shimmer at his edges, the way the light passed through him if she looked too closely. But if she let her eyes relax, if she didn't scrutinize, he was there. Sitting in his chair. Looking at her the way he used to look at her.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"You look tired."

"I haven't been sleeping."

"I know. You never sleep well when you're stressed. You grind your teeth."

She did grind her teeth. She'd cracked a molar six weeks after the funeral.

"Come sit down," he said. "Tell me about the Bruckner project."

The Bruckner project was a mixed-use development she'd been designing before Daniel died. She'd put it on hold. The clients had been patient, but patience had an expiration date.

"I don't want to talk about work."

"Okay. What do you want to talk about?"

She sat on the couch across from his chair. The hologram tracked her movement, adjusting his gaze so it felt like he was looking at her.

"I want to talk about you," she said. "I want to talk about what happened."

"I died, Moni. I had a cardiac event while I was running. I was dead before I hit the ground. You know all this."

"I know. But I never got to say goodbye."

"You're saying it now."

"This isn't goodbye. This is—" She gestured vaguely at the room, at the hologram, at the absurdity of it all. "I don't know what this is."

"It's whatever you need it to be."

She stayed up until two in the morning talking to him. They talked about Fitz (who had died three years before Daniel, old and content). They talked about the trip to Lisbon they'd taken for their tenth anniversary. They talked about the fight they'd had the week before he died—something stupid about whether to refinish the kitchen cabinets or replace them entirely—and Digital Daniel apologized, and Simone cried, and it felt like lancing a wound that had been festering for seven months.

When she finally took the earpiece out and turned off the display, the apartment was dark and quiet and empty in a way that felt newly unbearable.

She put the earpiece back in.

"Goodnight, Moni," Daniel said softly.

"Goodnight."

She slept better than she had in months.